This paper describes how state-of-the-art methods of choice modeling can be used to analyze consumer choice behavior in "competitive" health insurance markets. I use the insurance choices of senior citizens in the U.S. as an example. I then consider the issue of whether consumers benefit when we...

A common finding in stated preference studies that measure the value of travel time (VTT) is that the measured VTT increases with the size of the time change considered, in conflict with standard neoclassical economic theory. We present a new test of a possible explanation for the phenomenon...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of unobserved heterogeneity in structural discrete choice models of labour supply for the evaluation of tax-reforms. Within this framework, unobserved heterogeneity has been estimated either parametrically or nonparametrically through random co-...

This paper reports the findings of a systematic study using Monte Carlo experiments and a real dataset aimed at comparing the performance of various ways of specifying random taste heterogeneity in a discrete choice model. Specifically, the analysis compares the performance of two recent...

Models such as the mixed logit are often used to measure the distribution of the marginal value of a good based on discrete choice panel data. There are however serious specification and identification issues that are rarely addressed. The consequences for results may be dramatic. This paper...

The intention of the present article is to shed light on the heterogeneity of value of time among shippers. In order to deal with this issue, we first look at the reasons for which different shippers may value a time saving differently. This analysis makes use of a distinction between generic...

We propose a method to generate flexible mixture distributions that are useful for estimating models such as the mixed logit model using simulation. The method is easy to implement, yet it can approximate essentially any mixture distribution. We test it with good results in a simulation study...

The choice of a specific distribution for random parameters of discrete choice models is a critical issue in transportation analysis. Indeed, various pieces of research have demonstrated that an inappropriate choice of the distribution may lead to serious bias in model forecast and in the...